


ghosts

by unquietteal



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 17:36:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6293521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unquietteal/pseuds/unquietteal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Do you feel them heavy on you, all the lives you’ve taken weighing you down?<em></em></em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <em>Bucky struggles to come to terms with what he's done as The Winter Soldier</em>
  </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> i just have a lot of feelings about bucky barnes

Do you feel them heavy on you, all the lives you’ve taken weighing you down? When you close your eyes do they haunt you, shimmering faintly against the darkness? At night – tossing and turning – sweat freezing on your clammy skin: do they talk to you, beg you for release?

In the daylight they don’t seem so bad. You can forget about them, place them gently behind doors and lock them tight. Maybe you see someone’s eyes, and maybe they remind you of a small girl, terrified and screaming, cowering behind her dead mother’s body; maybe the door rattles softly and she calls out. Still terrified and screaming. But you can turn away, leave her behind; leave them all behind. It’s easy enough in the daylight.

The problem comes during the night, when the darkness is a blanket around you. Suffocating. When you can’t breathe, can barely think amidst their muttering and moaning: that’s when you open the door, let them pour out. They fill your dreams and turn them quickly into nightmares, dripping blood from necks and heads. A single gunshot clean between the eyes; a sharp cut across the throat. A body dropping heavily to the ground.

No matter what, you can’t escape them. And you don’t really want to, because it’s what you deserve; you were weak and you broke so easily. They turned you into a weapon – into a monster – and your lack of choice matters little when you're drowning beneath the guilt.

And Steve doesn’t understand – will never understand – just what it feels like: watching as your body does indescribable things, unable to stop any of it. Like a puppet; like a performer. And then forgetting it, not even noticing as the memories slip away, as the dead are erased. Coming back to a blank mind and not even realising that you're missing parts of yourself.

He tells you that it’s not your fault; you weren’t in control, Buck. That everything you did was them – you're blameless, you're a victim. Just as much a victim as any of the dead.

You don’t believe him.

You don’t believe him, and here’s why: because you know that if the situations were reversed Steve never would have shattered. He’s not made of that, not made of the same stuff as you; he would’ve fought it – fought them – for as long as it took to get free. Or he would’ve died trying. He never would’ve accepted it, never would’ve done everything they told him to do so complacently. Like a robot; like a fucking machine.

That’s all you are now, you know – a machine, a piece of metal attached to a vacant body. A weapon carelessly stitched onto flesh.

But Steve’s constantly telling you that you are more than what they made you into – that the assassin is only one facet of your personality, of who you are. He reassures you that in time, they’ll come back to you; in time, you’ll be a whole person again. That in time, you’ll find yourself.

He sounds so sure when he says it, and you wish it could come true just by the conviction in his heart. But you know that you’re missing pieces, like a jigsaw left out in a hurricane – you can never get them back and you'll always be unfinished. 

And the deaths – 

They haunt you, constantly.

How can you possibly become a person when you’re made up of their ghosts?

But some nights you wake up, a scream clawing to get out of your throat, and hear Steve murmuring in his sleep. And so you walk gently to his door and peek in – he always leaves it stupidly unlocked – and you see him tossing and turning, his sheets like prison bars around him.

He mumbles and whimpers, his voice hoarse and raw; on these nights, you and him are the same – both stuck in memories that won’t let go.

You shake him softly, or whisper his name in the stifling darkness; he springs awake, alert and tense, ready for danger; his eyes are wild and unfocused – still lost in the dream – but when they settle on you they calm, a rapid into a river. 

On these nights you realise: that he is just as scared as you are; that he’s missing parts of himself, too, and he’s terrified of never getting them back; that the past won’t give him up, and he’s constantly with one foot in then and one foot in now, switching between the two so often that he’s starting to fade.

And you’re trying to outrun your past but he’s craving for his, and you are both haunted by ghosts.


End file.
